Thursday, May 13, 2010

From the Jewish News (US), May 12 2010, by Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel:

Recent polls show that Americans, American Jews and Israelis all disapprove of President Obama's policies toward Israel. One reason for the disapproval that emerges in these polls is that the Obama administration pressures and criticizes Israel, while giving Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority a free pass.

Such perceptions happen to be well founded. For example, the Obama administration has almost entirely ignored Palestinian incitement. On the few occasions it has paid it any account at all, it has finessed and whitewashed it.

On June 4, 2009, President Obama delivered an address in Cairo directed to a worldwide Muslim audience. While he criticized Holocaust denial and hatred of Jews in the Muslim world, Obama said nothing about these in relation to the PA. Indeed, the word "incitement" did not pass his lips.

...On the contrary: when Obama referred to the problem of Palestinian incitement in his speech at Buchenwald on June 5, 2009, he even praised Abbas for having made some "progress" in dealing with it - implying that Abbas and the PA were part of solution rather than the problem.

In August 2009, Fatah held a conference in Bethlehem which reaffirmed its refusal to accept Israel's existence as a Jewish state, glorified terrorists living and dead by name, praised the "armed struggle," insisted on the so-called right of return, and rejected an end of claims in any future peace agreement with Israel.

Abbas himself declared, "We maintain the right to launch an armed resistance."

How did the Obama administration react? With silence.

...In January of this year, when terrorists from Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a recognized terrorist group, murdered an Israeli, Rabbi Meir Chai, in a drive-by shooting, the PA did not condemn the murder but did condemn the subsequent killing of the terrorists by Israel.

Abbas himself sent condolences to the families of the three terrorists; PA prime minister Salam Fayyad visited the terrorists' families; and Mahmoud Al-Aloul, member of the Fatah Central Committee, also praised the dead terrorists as heroes. But the Obama administration said nothing, even when specifically informed of these events by the Israeli government.

Similarly, when PA TV broadcast a sermon from Nablus's Bourin Mosque on January 29, in which Jews were declared "the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger. Enemies of humanity in general" and Muslims exhorted to murder them with the words "The Prophet says: 'You shall fight the Jews and kill them," the [Obama] administration continued to say nothing.

In March, the Obama administration ...failed ...to condemn - or indeed to say anything at all - about ...the PA's naming a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, the leader of the 1978 coastal road bus hijacking, in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were slaughtered.

When at last Secretary Clinton, several days later, provided the administration's first criticism of the obscene glorification of Mughrabi by Palestinians, it was only to whitewash and protect Abbas, Fayyad and the PA by incorrectly suggesting it was "a Hamas-controlled municipality" that had initiated the event.

Adding insult to injury, Clinton actually praised Abbas and Fayyad for their strengthening of "law and order."

At the time of these remarks, the PA was actively instigating violence in and around Jerusalem. Here, too, Clinton avoided any mention of the PA in referring to the disorders, speaking only of unidentified "instigators."

The conclusion is inevitable: the Obama administration is not interested in Palestinian incitement and sees it as its brief to protect the PA from exposure as sponsors of violence and purveyors of hate.

Assistant Secretary of State Phillip Crowley said last month that the administration "will continue [!] to hold Palestinian leaders accountable for incitement." Abbas and Fayyad must be quaking in their boots.

There is nothing more pitiful than a condemned man asking his executioner for the sword so that he may do his work for him.

As anti-Semitism rages once again in the blood-soaked lands that contain the ashes of your families, you have committed an act of potential suicide.

Three thousand of you, in a traitorous, backstabbing moment, have signed a petition condemning the State of Israel for its "actions" against the Palestinians.

By that act alone, you have strengthened the hand of the Iranian Hitler and all his cohorts in the Middle East who promise their constituents that they will wipe out every man, woman and child in Israel.

"You see," they now say, "even the Jews themselves agree with us!"

None of our enemies over the last two thousand years could have asked for more justification for their murderous plans than that which you have given Ahmadinejad and Al Qaeda.

After the loss of six million of your brothers and sisters in the lands you foolishly choose to live in, you have learned nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Your blood is on your own heads.

If ever there was a Divine Message to leave the European Galut/Exile, it was delivered between 1939 and 1945.

Fools! The God of Israel has given you a place of refuge, and you do everything you can to undermine it.

In the lifetimes of many of you, you have seen Europe go from a Hitlerean Kristallnacht to synagogues in Berlin now requiring armed guards for the High Holidays.

You French Jews who signed the petition condemning Israel have suddenly forgotten that not so long ago your chief rabbi begged Orthodox Jewish youngsters not to wear their yarmulkes in the street. All around you, Islamic extremists fling Jewish products off the shelves of Parisian stores and throw rocks at Jewish schoolchildren.

One can almost see Herzl walking home at night from the Dreyfus trial with the words "Mort pour les Juife!" - "Death to the Jews!" - ringing in his ears.

Sleep peacefully, Jews of Paris and Berlin. Certainly the countries in which you reside - countries long marinated in murderous anti-Semitism - will provide protection for you the day the Islamic extremists overrun them.

Of course they will.

The lesson of the 1930s screams out to you: The great Revisionist Zionist leader Jabotinsky went from town to town in Europe proclaiming "Jews! My hair is gray with worry over you. You are sitting atop a volcano. Run for your lives!"

The Jews of Europe did not listen then, but they never tried to block their own escape route as you do now.

The economic instability of Europe glares from headlines around the world as rioters rock the streets of Greece while Spain shakes in its boots. It was just this kind of economic crisis that paved the way for Hitler. The Islamofascists living near you see this as their moment. With help from their oil-rich cousins in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, they will offer economic "relief" to the financially strapped European countries to which they have migrated. There will, of course, be strings attached.

While you sign petitions condemning your fellows Jews in Israel, these thugs will be taking out contracts on your lives.

How dare you!

The world has not let up against us for two thousand years, and now you aid and abet the hand of the enemy by signing a document they can point to in order to justify sending homicide bombers into Israeli pizza shops to murder Jewish children in cold blood.

One day you will beg Israel to grant you refuge from a Europe whose message to you should have been clear seventy years ago. Who knows? Maybe the Haifa harbor will be blockaded once again. Maybe your refugee ships will be turned away as others were in the past.

You are disconnected from reality, and if you do not act now by standing up for your people, you are doomed. You have damaged Israel in the eyes of the world.

Tonight I celebrated the 43rd anniversary of the re-unification of Jerusalem amongst my People at the Western Wall. The plaza was filled with tens of thousands of people, from babes in arms to the elderly, shoulder to shoulder, waving flags, dancing and singing songs of praise to our beloved city...

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

When a major Arab state would finally sign a peace treaty with Israel, it was long assumed, the Arab-Israeli conflict would end. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979, however, buried that expectation; it had the perverse effect of making other states and also the Egyptian populace more anti-Zionist.

The 1980s gave birth to a hope that, instead, Palestinian recognition of Israel would close the conflict. The total failure of the 1993 Declaration of Principles (also known as the Oslo Accords) then buried that expectation...

...Starting about 2007, a new focus has emerged, of winning acceptance of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state. Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmert set the terms: "I do not intend to compromise in any way over the issue of the Jewish state. This will be a condition for our recognition of a Palestinian state."

...Arab-Israeli diplomacy has dealt with a myriad of subsidiary issues while tiptoeing around the conflict's central issue: "Should there be a Jewish state?" Disagreement over this answer – rather than over Israel's boundaries, its exercise of self defense, its control of the Temple Mount, its water consumption, its housing construction in West Bank towns, diplomatic relations with Egypt, or the existence of a Palestinian state – is the key issue.

Palestinian leaders responded, with howls of outrage, declaring that they "absolutely refused" to accept Israel as a Jewish state. They even pretended to be shocked at the notion of a state defined by religion, although their own "Constitution of the State of Palestine," third draft, states that "Arabic and Islam are the official Palestinian language and religion." Olmert's efforts went nowhere.

On taking over the prime ministry in early 2009, Binyamin Netanyahu reiterated Olmert's point in his diplomacy. Regrettably, the Obama administration endorsed the Palestinian position, again sidelining the Israeli demand. (Instead, it focuses on housing for Jews in Jerusalem. Talk about the heart of the issue.)

If Palestinian politicians reject Israel's Jewish nature, what about the Palestinian and the broader Arab and Muslim publics? Polls and other evidence suggest a long-term average of 20 percent acceptance of Israel, whether in the Mandatory period or now, whether Muslims in Canada or Palestinians in Lebanon.

...Although 20 percent constitutes a small minority, its consistency over time and place offers encouragement. That one-fifth of Muslims, Arabs, and even Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state suggests that, despite a near-century of indoctrination and intimidation, a base for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict does exist.

Would-be peacemakers must direct their attention to increasing the size of this moderate cohort. Getting from 20 percent to, say, 60 percent would fundamentally shift the politics of the Middle East, displacing Israel from its exaggerated role and releasing the peoples of this blighted region to address their real challenges. Not Zionism but such, oh, minor problems as autocracy, brutality, cruelty, conspiracism, religious intolerance, apocalypticism, political extremism, misogyny, slavery, economic backwardness, brain drain, capital flight, corruption, and drought.

May 11, 2010 update: United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 of Nov. 29, 1947, which called for the partition of the British-ruled Palestine Mandate into two states, uses the term "Jewish State," notes a reader, Geoff D. Bloch of Melbourne, Australia. Indeed, the resolution refers thirty times to an as-yet-unnamed "Jewish State." For example:

Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.

Comments: (1) Being a "Jewish state" is not just an Israeli whim but the legal reason for this polity coming into existence. (2) The unnamed "Arab State" is just that - Arab, not Muslim. Hamas has different ideas.

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